I wanna complain about the fact that I’ve got a complaining attitude. Why did this happen to me? Why can’t I just mellow out and get positive? Why do I have to always consider the fear, the downside, the worst case scenario? What the hell is it? Can I blame my depression era parents on this? Can I? They scrimped and saved and worried and crawled through their lives — and made sure that each one of my siblings drank the mother’s milk of fear.
My way of dealing with it was to joke around. I always had a line – a response and a way of pointing out the absurdity of living with fear as the prime motivator. “Girls like that don’t end up so hot,” my mother would tell me whenever some particular woman behaved in a way inconsistent with her notions of puritan morality. “Men don’t marry girls like that..” “do that, and you’ll starve..”
The greatest indignity in my mother’s book was to be a jackass. “She’s a jackass.” Whatever happened to me in life, I didn’t want to end up a jackass. We all knew the various routes to jackassdom. Give up your virginity before you’re married – that was first. Another way to get jackass status was to dress in a provocative manner. Makeup to school before you are 18 set you on a jackass course and calling boys, failing to attend church, practice the piano or achieve cadet status in girlscouts were high indicators of future jackass status.
Okay. So I’m trying not to be a jackass, except in politics where I’m a proud liberal democrat jackass. Trying not to be a jackass lately means meditating, staying focused on my projects, determination to be productive, physically, intellectually and emotionally. Not easy for someone who did a lot of jackass things for a long time.
One thing about the jackass. It is stubborn. The jackass is a reliable beast of burden. In the absence of something better, it will get the job done. For me, there is something noble about all this. We’ll start here.
